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Demonstrations of effects are playing important role in teaching, so analogies may or may not reveal new laws of physics, but they certainly will inspire new sc

• LeifCarrotson 8y ago
  This is especially important when we're talking about something as difficult to observe, measure, and test as astronomical phenomena. Staring at F = G * m_1 * m_2 / r^2 may not provide an intuitive sense of what's happening for many students. Many equations in physics are just not that complicated. A few constants, a multiplication here, a division there, and a square or square root operation describe most of the mathematics. If you can come up with a physical analogy that operates on the same mathematics (like using electric charges and Coulomb's Law - which matches the above equation - to simulate gravity), you can do interesting tests on a workbench with some wires and charged spheres where real world tests would be impractical. This is really cool and useful! However, conveying understanding of an existing law that we already know isn't the same as revealing new physics. Coulomb's law and Newton's law of universal gravitation are the same; that's not to say you can hook up the electrical charges in a Coulomb's Law demonstrator to an electric circuit and reveal something that could be done with gravity.